The Record: Letters, Sunday, Feb. 23

The Constitution gives to Congress the control of the nation’s purse. Our annual procedure has become, although not consistently in recent years, that the president submits a budget.

This budget represents the planned expenditures of the departments in fulfilling their duties to provide the services to defend the country and to support the smooth transfer of goods and services among the states. It is then the responsibility of Congress to approve or modify the expenditures.

It then has the further responsibility to provide the revenue to pay for these expenditures through taxes or borrowing through the sale of Treasury bonds. If the expenses of the country exceed the revenues, it is by the action of Congress, not the president.

If we have amassed a large national debt it is because Congress authorized expenditures on wars, roads or pensions without providing taxes to pay for them. The president cannot spend without the approval of Congress, so the current national deficits and the debt were with the approval of Congress.

Your article about protests in Ukraine as a country "divided between Russia and the West" gives the impression that the division is equal. It is not. Two-thirds of the country supports ties with the West on both historical and pragmatic grounds.

Ethnic, indigenous Ukrainians in eastern Ukraine were forcibly resettled to Siberia and Khazakstan most notably under Stalin. His purges and collectivization sought to eliminate all political and nationalist opposition to a repressive Soviet regime. Current support of Russia in eastern Ukraine is a vestige of Stalinism, but even there, support of President Viktor Yanukovich is waning.

Russian’s Foreign Ministry’s depiction of the violence in Ukraine as a "brown revolution," referring to Nazism in 1933, is hypocritical since all Soviet and Russian regimes, including Vladimir Putin’s, have resorted to strong-arm tactics to silence Ukrainian dissent.

They employ vigilante groups like those led by Vadym Titushko whose name has become a noun, "Titushky," to describe the provocateurs who attack journalists and anti-government protesters in an effort to silence legitimate civic protest. Russia does not want Ukraine, an important country within Europe and a potential economic powerhouse, to leave its orbit.

But the current unrest in Ukraine also underscores the desires of most Ukrainians, and what western democracies continually tout: the right of a country to choose its own government and destiny. If Ukrainians wanted closer ties with Russia they wouldn’t be dying in Kiev’s Independence (Maidan) Square.

Alexandra Drazniowsky Curtis

Harrington Park, Feb. 20

Teaneck school board

unfair to teachers

It is deplorable that the Teaneck Board of Education has stubbornly and without good reason rejected the impartial state mediator’s recommendation for settling the Teaneck teachers’ contract after almost three years. The mediator looked at all the relevant information and proposed a fair and equitable solution, which the union accepted immediately.